Billy Bragg

by Andrew Collins

  In December, Billy turned nineteen, and punk rock happened. Although 1976 is traditionally cited as The Year That Punk Broke, it took a while longer to trickle through to the outskirts of youth culture.

  The major players in the movement by which all future movements will be measured were certainly chopping up the ingredients and bringing the pan to the boil in 1976: Joe Strummer was enticed away from The 101ers to front the newly-formed Clash; Stiff records put out what is widely recognised as the first punk single, ‘New Rose’ by The Damned; London’s 100 Club held its overstated Punk Festival with the Buzzcocks and The Vibrators; the NME put Johnny Rotten on the cover in October on the eve of their Anarchy In The UK Tour, and, on 1 December, the Sex Pistols sealed their folk-devil fate by calling Thames TV’s Today presenter Bill Grundy a dirty bastard and a fucking rotter, live. The Daily Mirror reported that a 47-year-old lorry driver, James Holmes, literally kicked the TV in. (‘It blew up and I was knocked backwards.’)

  However, a survey of the Top 40 for 1976 totally belies this punk upsurge. A brief appearance by Eddie & The Hot Rods’ ‘Teenage Depression’ at the non-business end of the chart in November provides but a lone ripple. For punk’s historical Year Zero, there was an awful lot of Chicago, Showaddywaddy, Demis Roussos and Brotherhood of Man cluttering up the nation’s consciousness. If popular music’s cheesy equilibrium was ripe for upset, it categorically did not happen in 1976, although the Pistols’ ‘Anarchy In The UK’ did sort of bump against the edge of the table in the week before Christmas – in at 38 with a pellet.

  This would all change in 1977, the year in which the youth of Barking truly started to become self-conscious about trouser width. It was the year that changed rock’n’roll’s life.

  Over twenty years later, it is easy to belittle the musical merits of the revolution, but the whole ethos was that anyone could play the guitar, and a decade-long smokescreen was lifted from an instrument that had previously empowered working people from the blues through to white America’s diluted interpretation, rock’n’roll. The joy of three chords had been hijacked by the virtuosos during progressive rock and ‘sixth-form music’ (even its dirty-fingernailed cousin, heavy metal, was prone to exhibition twiddling). ‘Punk was a reaction to the increasing pride in technical virtuosity that was overrunning rock on every level,’ concludes Ken Tucker in Rolling Stone’s 1987 history Rock Of Ages. Billy and Wiggy had sided with the Faces and the Stones because their guitar-playing was, as they saw it, honest and visceral rather than showy and over-tutored. Little wonder that punk mobilised them.

  Charles Shaar Murray, writing in the NME in 1986, looked back on punk with the benefit of hindsight, and observed that it ‘embodied the tension between the anarchists and the rock fundamentalists: those who wanted to make rock’n’roll exciting and worthwhile again and those who simply wanted to destroy it. Both factions had fun, both factions made money, and in the long run both sides lost.’ The piece was rather gloomily headlined ‘I Fought The Biz And The Biz Won’, but Murray’s analysis was on the money: punk was all about conflict and compromise, not least the trade-off between so-called anarchist doctrine and signing to a record company for £15,000. It was only apt that Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren would later mix the terminology of the confidence trickster with the deadspeak of marketing (The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle, Flogging A Dead Horse, Some Product).

  If the desire to destroy Pink Floyd and put a safety pin through the Queen’s nose was there in the loins of the urban disenfranchised, a first wave of heroes was required to release it. Once McLaren and his managerial Clash counterpart, Bernie Rhodes, had taken their respective scruffs by the neck, and turned them into punk’s first icons, the sluice gates were open.

  In March 1977, and first off the blocks, Robert Handley procured The Damned’s first album, Damned Damned Damned, albeit on reel-to-reel tape (he’d recorded it from little Kevin Beech, another grammar school boy who would, much later, become the band’s bass player). Billy and Wiggy gave this revolutionary noise their best ear, but thought it sounded like it was at the wrong speed. Too fast. But given time, punk would eventually turn all their heads – they were, after all, living the DIY dream so brilliantly encapsulated by Sniffin’ Glue fanzine in 1976: ‘This is a chord (A). This is another (E). This is a third (G). NOW FORM A BAND.’

  Dropping the name Flying Tigers as nonchalantly as they’d adopted it, Billy, Ricey, Wiggy and Robert moved, namelessly, into proper recording. They shelled out for a day’s studio time at Alvic in Wimbledon, a four-track with a piano. The resulting six songs, according to Billy, ‘weren’t that great, but we learnt a lot’. They made a leap in the right direction at Black Hole studios, an eight-track, by which time they had their hands on a Fender Champ guitar amp that sounded noticeably better when cranked up (by now, Wiggy had become immersed in the technical side of things, including sound). The recording trail took them from South London to what is now Dockland – each time they would ‘make a day of it, and get pissed out of our brains. It validated us as a band.’

  There were no legitimate gigs on the horizon as yet, but they gamely sent demo tapes out to likely London pub venues, the Bridge House, the Red Lion, the Greyhound in Fulham. This limbo period did not last too long.

  In 1977, all four members of the band were working: Robert at the Co-Op, Ricey at Ford’s, Billy as a bank messenger, and Wiggy at a Barking insurance office (‘I was slowly becoming in charge, due to the high staff turnover,’ he says. ‘I was the only one who knew where everything was’). They had money in their pockets and fire in their bellies and, in May, they enjoyed their first unmistakable punk rock epiphany.

  Rock’n’roll has always nurtured tribalism, be it mods versus rockers, teddy boys versus beatniks, bikers versus soulboys, and though the early punks hungrily adopted a defiant ‘us against everybody’ stance, unity was rapidly undermined by the emergence of smaller, often geographical, factions. For instance, in the Paddington area, you had anachronistic long-hairs very much in the New York Dolls mould – whence rose the proto-Clash collective London SS. In direct opposition, you had the crop-headed Sex shop crew down Chelsea’s King’s Road. Equally, round Barking way, you were either into the Sex Pistols or you were into Eddie & The Hot Rods, one a media-friendly art-school project, the other a choice name from the pub-rock boom.

  Billy, Wiggy, Ricey and Robert were strictly Hot Rods. Billy still believes them to be the great lost punk band, but concedes that their heads-down brand of 800-miles-an-hour R&B – ‘Get Out Of Denver’, ‘96 Tears’, ‘Woolly Bully’, ‘Gloria’ – was left standing still when the Sex Pistols turned into a one-band cultural revolution and created what film-maker Julian Temple called ‘absurd anarchist theatre’. (Incidentally, Riff Raff covered ‘Get Out Of Denver’ without ever knowing what the original words were. ‘I still don’t,’ Billy states with pride.)

  The Hot Rods distinction led our boys swiftly to The Jam – working class, mod roots, no evidence of higher education – whom they saw live at London’s Nashville Room in Kensington. ‘We didn’t discover them or anything,’ Billy says. ‘But they packed the place out.’ Having failed to connect with The Damned or the Pistols (‘I couldn’t see where they were coming from. What’s my connection to it? What does it mean to me?’), Billy found himself plugging into something he really related to with Paul Weller’s Woking-based mob.

  The real pivotal moment in all this occurred on 9 May, at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park. In attendance for another dollop of Jam, when they’d bought their tickets Billy and co were unaware that this was an early date on The Clash’s now-legendary White Riot tour. Their debutante live jaunt whose 27 dates had kicked off at the Roxy on 1 May would project the CBS-signed, former-Pistols warm-up act to nationwide notoriety (friction with The Jam, violence in the stalls, a pillowcase nicked from the Newcastle Holiday Inn). ‘We didn’t go for The Clash,’ Billy confirms. ‘And we certainly didn’t go for Subway Sect or the Buzzcocks!’

  The Barking
contingent were in the front row of the balcony (‘Just as well,’ recalls Wiggy), and were soon mired in disappointment when it became clear that The Jam ‘didn’t work’ in such a cavernous venue, their sinewy rage failing to fill the space around them, despite Weller’s best scissor-kicking efforts. (The Jam, who’d had to ‘buy on’ to the tour in the first place, suspected that The Clash were actually tampering with the support bands’ PA in order to make themselves sound unnaturally good and, whether this is true or not, it led to the trio’s decision to quit the tour after a handful of dates. Despite Weller’s admiration for The Clash, it was not a marriage made in punk heaven.)

  This heart-sinking letdown was more than compensated for by the main act. The Clash exploded on to the stage in red trousers and white shirts, and it wasn’t long before Billy and Wiggy had experienced the full Road To Damascus. Billy takes up the story: ‘Not only were The Clash playing with the same equipment as the Rolling Stones, not only did they have the energy that we’d found in the Rolling Stones, but they were throwing the same Rolling Stones shapes that we were imitating up at Magnet! We looked at each other and it clicked, and that was it! We realised that we were what they were, even though we weren’t officially punks yet.’

  The audience, in what Jon Savage recognised in England’s Dreaming as ‘the first outbreak of pure punk mania’, tore out the first few rows of seats and basically chucked them onstage. Former Sounds writer Jonh Ingham remembered, ‘Standing in the lobby of the Rainbow between sets, all you could hear was the sound of plastic glasses being ground under people’s heels.’ If Billy’s ‘cleansing fires of punk’ were ignited anywhere, it was here.

  The other contributing factor to the intoxicating magic of The Clash was their evident love of black music, which Billy and Wiggy shared (the White Riot set included their staccato version of Junior Murvin’s ‘Police & Thieves’). The boys’ roundabout appreciation of black music through the blues-influenced Rolling Stones was compounded by a new-found relish for Bob Marley, who, in 1977, was about to break big with his chart-busting Exodus set. Billy first heard Marley on Capitol Radio, and recalls thinking, ‘Desmond Dekker with guitar solos! Incredible!’

  ‘Without even knowing it, we were already on a par with where The Jam and The Clash were coming from.’

  Joe Strummer was a ripe old 24 at the time, but most of punk’s dramatis personae were in the 19-20-21 ballpark. Billy Bragg felt as if he was utterly alongside his new heroes, having naturally idolised remote thirtysomethings in his teenage years (Dylan, Rod, Mick, Keith). This was what made punk so vital, so accessible, so imitable and so do-able.

  Barking’s counterfeit Stones were transformed, overnight, into a wannabe Clash, and agreed, like the four Musketeers, that it was all for punk and punk for all, and high time they struck out for glory. ‘We were bursting,’ says Wiggy. So it was, in the summer of 1977, and in the spirit of 1976, that the four decided to go on holiday together …

  As Billy will hypothesise to this day, the 1970s in this country officially began in 1977. It’s a fetching theory, if one that leaves the decade just two years in length bearing in mind that the 1980s began in 1979, when Thatcher got in. (To follow through: the 1980s ended in 1997 when Blair got in, and who knows how long the 1990s will last.)

  The lead-up to 1977 was a rehearsal – it took that long to shake off the spectre of the 1960s – and in Barking, from backroom via Gascoigne School to Magnet, the band who would be Riff Raff had really got their shit together. The prototype had legs. It even had wheels.

  Ricey, being a skilled Ford’s mechanic, had the car. (Somebody always has to have ‘the car’.) It was a second-hand automatic, but, flashily enough, it was American: a Ford Mercury Calienti convertible. The band used to drive around in it and try to pull women, using the electric soft-top. Ricey would pull up at traffic lights, and, spying a couple of likely-looking lasses, hit the switch and flip the top. This might have been a more alluring gesture had the rest of them not sung the Thunderbirds theme as the canopy went back. By all accounts, birds remained resolutely unpulled – indeed, Billy looks back on his zero strike-rate with a measure of non-macho pride.

  What chance did they have, when chat-up conversations promised an evening of ‘going round Barking’?

  Ricey had what has since been identified as ‘a life’ (as we shall soon see), but the other three had nothing of the sort, unless sitting around repeatedly listening to the fadeout of Rod Stewart & The Faces’ ‘Los Paraguayos’ counts. Down at the Co-Op undertakers, Robert would while away his afternoons getting pissed on beer which he would keep cool in the obvious – if slightly macabre – way. Being left to lock up at the end of a working day, he would record inappropriately giggly outgoing messages on the answering machine for any overnight deaths. ‘These were not serious jobs,’ Billy vouchsafes. ‘Our lives revolved around the band.’

  Just as TS Eliot’s tragic J Alfred Prufrock measured out his life ‘in coffee spoons’, Riff Raff (as they were on the verge of being christened) measured theirs in strips of photos from a booth in Barking Station. Whatever the significant occasion, the boys would record it in front of the little grey curtain: the night they saw the Stones at Earls Court and bagged the bucket handle; the night they saw ex-Small Face Ronnie Lane with his new band Slim Chance supporting Eric Clapton at the Rainbow; the day they travelled all the way out to leafy Richmond to buy an historic Ampeg amp from Ronnie Lane’s roadie after seeing it advertised in Melody Maker; even the day they bought Exile On Main St.

  The big idea, in August 1977, was to go away on holiday as a band to Butlins, play all week and sing for their supper. Sadly, they don’t really encourage that at holiday camps, so Billy had another look through the back of Melody Maker. Something might come up.

  4. BIG IN CLOPTON

  Riff Raff, 1977–1980

  Truly is Northamptonshire a county that he must know who would know England and learn more of its imperishable story!

  Arthur Mee, Northamptonshire, 1945

  NEVER MIND THE wonderful sights and the crazy sounds, there are three distinct smells that sum up 1977 for Billy Bragg. One of them is marijuana. ‘In 1977, I did a number of things I’d never done before, like hang around with people who smoked dope.’ Another is new carpet. ‘I went in a lot of recording studios, which all had new carpet, and sometimes the smell of new carpet is very evocative of that year.’ But to complete the olfactory picture, add the unmistakable whiff of the countryside.

  ‘Getting it together in the country’ is a rock cliché that dates back to 1967, when Steve Winwood and his brother Muff left Birmingham’s Spencer Davis Group at the height of their success, and the former hooked up with three mates (Jim Capaldi, Dave Mason and Chris Wood) and took off for a cottage in the Berkshire village of Aston Tirrold. Here, they chilled out and came up with the first Traffic album, Mr Fantasy, and used the place as a base for two years, attracting such noteworthy visitors as Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend and Ginger Baker. The effect for musicians zonked out on the London music scene was like a breath of fresh air.

  On scanning Melody Maker’s superior classified-ads section (it remained the paper’s major selling point for years), Billy happened across the key to the next stage in the band’s development:

  Get it right. Save money. Rehearse your music in acoustically excellent country farmhouse studio. Check out our album/stage set on TEAC 3340 and Revox A77. Bring a mobile/do masters. We have Steinway, Fender, Wurlitzer, Peavey, AKG, MM, PA and desk available. Eat good, sleep good, very reasonable charges. Phone now.

  Bingo! Exactly ten years after Traffic, they decided to go wild in the country – for a week. The studio was called Bearshank Lodge (or just Bearshanks), and it was situated just outside Oundle in East Northamptonshire, which Billy knew was roughly one county along from Warwickshire, where he’d spent so many idyllic farm summers – and about as far away from Magnet, Cheapside, Ford’s and the Co-Op as any of the band could imagine. They couldn’t even pronounce Oun
dle, so they ‘phoned now’.

  By this stage, although the exact timing is indistinct, a local lad named Johnny Waugh had joined the band on bass (finally, they had a bass player!). Although not from Billy, Wiggy, Robert or Ricey’s alma mater, Johnny could play at ‘school-band level’, and was a crucial addition. So, on 19 August 1977, the five-piece went to Oundle, on a trip that would knock the rock’n’roll world they were in love with off its axis.

  Ricey was dispatched up the A1 in his bird-magnet with all the gear in the back and little idea just how muddy his journey was going to get before he reached the other end, while the rest of them took the train to Peterborough, and then the bus into snoozy Oundle.

  Traffic’s reasons for a rural retreat were remarkably similar to Riff Raff’s. ‘In London, the neighbours would be banging on the walls,’ recalled Steve Winwood. ‘We wanted somewhere we could play whenever we wanted.’ Traffic’s country cottage was ‘a hovel’ – a gamekeeper’s cottage on a sumptuous estate set against the rolling Berkshire Downs. ‘It was very cut off with no road to it, just a track, and there were only about three weeks in the year when you could get a car up there.’

  Bearshanks – or ‘Bare Shanks’ as Zig Zag magazine misspelt it in 1980 – was similarly off the beaten path, but rather than nestling within a country estate, it was on the way up to a farm belonging to a grumpy farmer. Owned by Ruan O’Lochlainn and his wife Jackie, they’d bought it in 1976 for £4,000, and subsequently spent £20,000 refurbishing it. It was ‘just a pile of stones’, they told the Peterborough Evening Telegraph, and they had to put in electricity, rebuild the roof, install windows and carry out ‘hundreds of repairs’.